Dissidia Final Fantasy NT Review

It's been about seven years since North American gamers had the opportunity to play a new Final Fantasy fighter. Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is a huge departure from the PSP games so let's see if this arcade adaptation is suitable for the living room.

I always wondered how that puny guy can swing such a giant sword

I remember when Dissidia Final Fantasy debuted back in 2009. The concept of a fighting game with a cast of Final Fantasy characters was just awesome and the game was pretty fun, too. It saw a sequel a couple years later in the form of Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy then in 2015, Team Ninja's take on the formula released in Japanese arcades. Finally, here we have Dissidia Final Fantasy NT which is the full-fledged console version of that 2015 arcade fighter. When I booted it up, I was blown away by the absolutely gorgeous character models and environments. Seeing many of the 8 and 16-bit characters that I grew up with fully rendered in modern 3D visuals had my inner fanboy excited. Playing as classic characters such as Terra, Kain, and even Kefka while fighting newbies Noctis, Lightning, and some chap named "Ace" (yes, I know who he is) feels just incredible. Heck, even Ramza from Final Fantasy Tactics is playable. How awesome is that?

After my Final Fantasy fanboy tendencies calmed down, it was time to get serious so I played through the tutorials and learned what Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is all about. Basically, two teams of three fighters duke it out in an arena until one team suffers from three incapacitations. Each character is surprisingly mobile as they can dash around, glide through the air, and ascend walls. The combat is quite basic as all you do is unleash a fury of attacks and skills. Some attacks cause damage to your opponent's bravery which weakens them and others primarily hurt their HP while skills can buff your allies or harm your foes. It's very satisfying to single out an adversary, weaken them, perhaps inflict a status ailment like poison, then land a final blow that instantly incapacitates them.

Meanwhile, you can charge a summon meter by attacking both your opponents and a crystal that emerges ever so often. Summons have pre-summoning and post-summoning effects that can turn the tide of battle. The effects depend on which summon you have equipped: Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh, Odin, Leviathan, Alexander, or Bahamut. Overall, the mix of intense 3-on-3 action, teamwork, and this summon system combine to make for a truly exciting battle dynamic that's even more of a blast while playing online.

Lightning returns to kick ass yet again

Unfortunately, that excitement quickly dies down after a few hours of duking it out due to the fact that there isn't much variation in combat. No matter which character I played as, the gameplay eventually started feeling all too similar. Essentially, the only aspect that adds a bit of variety is that you can take part in Core Battles which tasks you with depleting the opposing team's core crystal instead of just focusing on attacking the other team's characters. To make the lack of gameplay variety even more difficult to deal with, there definitely isn't much content. First of all, there is no local multiplayer component and the single player content merely consists of battling through a succession of adversaries in various arcade gauntlets. Even the story mode is just a tree of non-interactive cutscenes plus the odd boss. Obviously, playing online is the most fruitful option but even that starts to feel monotonous after a dozen or so matches.

As you play, you'll acquire treasure tokens, gil, and memoria. The latter simply unlocks cutscenes in the branching story mode's tree. Redeeming tokens for treasure grants you an assortment of random items while gil lets you buy whichever items you want. These items consist of character costumes, weapons, chat messages, player icons, and music tracks. There are a lot of items to unlock and acquiring everything will take a very long time considering how slowly you expand your collection of content.

Finally, I wanted to mention one irritating issue that I regularly encountered during my time with Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. When you're battling, the visuals can become extremely chaotic with loads of visual effects that frequently obscure, blur, and distort your field of vision. Whenever this happened, I couldn't help but get annoyed that I had no idea what the heck was going on. The visual effects certainly look cool but when they get in the way of the gameplay, it's just frustrating.

Victorious with a mere 0.63 seconds left on the clock!

With a lack of modes and repetitive and unvaried gameplay, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is a disappointing long-awaited follow-up to a decent duology of portable fighters. That being said, there's definitely enough Final Fantasy eye candy to satisfy diehard fans.

A.J. Maciejewski (crazyaejay): Thanks for reading my review of Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. Feel free to ask any questions about the game or provide feedback and I'll gladly reply.

John Doe: Eh not to hate or anything but it doesn't seem you played the game fully. I know SE gave the review copies out late so it can't have been easy. The story mode isn't just "a tree of non-interactive scenes" there's also boss battles. As for the combat feeling the same. I think that's impossible given that characters are separated into 4 unique classes (Vangaurd, Assassin, Marksman, Specialist) all of which play extremely different and have to be used differently. Something you forgot to mention. Also certain characters have completely unique gimmicks on top of their unique EX Skill. I agree with some of your other sentiments though, a Dissidia psp fan wanting more of the same shouldn't buy. It's a competitive online focused game now

A.J. Maciejewski (crazyaejay): Hi, John. I apologize that I didn't go more in-depth with those couple of aspects in the review and I admit that I didn't cover them fully but perhaps I can explain my thoughts about them more thoroughly in this comment. First of all, I added "plus the odd boss" in the review body because I agree that just saying the story mode is non-interactive is neither fair nor accurate. To be clear, I expected some sort of cohesive adventure-like narrative but instead, it's primarily just nodes that you unlock so that's why I emphasized non-interactive. Anyway, I found the boss fights with the summons to look amazing but weren't nearly as enjoyable as the 3-on-3 battles. I just went through the motions as their health bars depleted which wasn't very engaging. The character classes definitely add variety and the individual characters have their own play styles, too. Plus, being able to customize skill loadouts added an extra layer of complexity. However, I still found the base gameplay to become monotonous quite fast no matter how often I changed up my character and abilities. For me, it's the combination of its simple gameplay and unfocused fighting dynamic that made it become so tiresome. That being said, I can see how some gamers can get a knack for the whole formula and spend hours mastering their skills online but for many more (myself included), the fighting just isn't as visceral or immediately gratifying as many other fighters on the market.

Larx (larxinostic): 6.7 seems a tad high. Mostly because I cannot get the game to work properly on my PS4. At all. =/ Did you play on a Pro or a newer 1TB model, by chance? I own the original 500GB. 'Bout to give up either way 'cause the game looks messy and not especially compelling compared to the PSP duo(decim). I like the concept enough to continue to try, but it's not lookin' good for functionality. Ah well... Not like I can play right now anyway! An ice storm obliterated our electricity. Typing on smartphone = slooow going. I envy the Canadian infrastructure, all properly equipped to weather ice and snow. Down in the Mid-Atlantic USA, everyone panics over a centimeter or two. Silly. :P

A.J. Maciejewski (crazyaejay): Wow, that sounds poopy. What happens when you try to play it? I played it on the original model PS4 with an upgraded 2TB hard drive and it worked just fine... besides being rather disappointing. Good luck dealing with the weather! It sucks having no power. In my old apartment, the power shut off about once a month. It was so annoying. The worst part is thinking "oh, I'll just do this thing instead" then realising "oh yeah, that needs power" for the entire time that the power is off.